‘what the dawn will bring to light’ ‘Newsreel’, which appears only a page after this inOverturesto Death,deploysan
unexpected imagery of conception and gestation to rebuke those movie-goers who
leave history at the door of the cinema’s ‘dream-house’.^47 The silver screen converts
the public sphere into the banal stereotypes of the newsreel, so that even footage
of the ‘iron seed’ of big guns, ‘erected|To plant death in your world’s soft womb’,
fails to trouble a ‘watery, womb-deep sleep’. The conclusion spells out the import
of these somewhat strained Freudianisms, insisting that such supposed ‘exotics’ will
soon
Grow nearer home—and out of the dream-house stumbling
One night into a strangling air and the flung
Rags of children and thunder of stone niagaras tumbling,
You’ll know you slept too long.The sense that it will all eventually come home to roost in our own sheltered
island is, perhaps, the most pervasive of poetic conventions in the later 1930s. Louis
MacNeice first considered Spain in his ‘Eclogue from Iceland’, the country he was
visiting with Auden in 1936 when they heard the news of Franco’s insurrection.
In that poem, the character Craven reports that ‘This Easter I was in Spain, before
the Civil War,|Gobbling the tripper’s treats, the local colour,’ but ‘The comedy of
the bootblacks in the caf ́es’, the architecture, bullfights, and the ‘scrawled hammer
and sickle’ were to him ‘all copy—impenetrable surface’, so that he ‘did not look
for the sneer beneath the surface’.^48 MacNeice’sAutumn Journal,writteninthelast
months of 1938, and published in May 1939 after the fall of the Spanish Republic,
certainly penetrates that surface, though critics have overlooked the extent to which
what ‘Spain’ signified in this period informs the whole narrative, and not just the
section in which it is most obviously addressed. Cunningham, for example, reprints
section VI of the poem but not the two closing sections (XXIII and XXIV), in which
a return to Barcelona in December 1939, as the Republic faltered and died, prompts
reflections on what this implies for the whole future of Europe.
Beginning with personal delight in the sunshine, exclaiming that ‘To-day was
a beautiful day’, section V of the poem homes in at once on newspaper posters
urgently headlining Hitler and ‘the dull refrain of the caption ‘‘War’’|Buzzing
around us’.^49 Admitting to being one of those who, in Day Lewis’s phrase, had slept
too long, MacNeice here acknowledges that now ‘The bloody frontier|Converges
on our beds.’ We can’t, he says (recalling Christ’s moment of weakness and
vacillation in Gethsemane), ask at this hour for the cup to be taken from us, ‘Having
helped to fill it ourselves’. The section closes, however, by restoring that opening
‘To-day’ to the anxious public world. The insomniac poet finally drifts off as dawn
(^47) C. Day Lewis, ‘Newsreel’, inOvertures to Death(London: Jonathan Cape, 1938), 17.
(^48) Louis MacNeice, ‘Eclogue from Iceland’,in W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice,Letters from
Iceland 49 (London: Faber, 1937), 126–7.
MacNeice,Autumn Journal,inCollected Poems, ed. Peter McDonald (London: Faber, 2007), 109.